This Blog is about many things Rainer is interested in. This happens to include syslog, astronomy and other fun things.

Friday, November 07, 2008

Windows 2008 Event Log...

Did you know - Windows 2008 has a much changed event log format. There are new APIs and formats all over that operating system. The first incarnation of the new logging system was seen in Windows Vista, but, being a workstation OS, it did not receive much attention from the corporate world.

When Vista came out, we at Adiscon immediately introduced the new event log monitor V2 service in MonitorWare Agent and EventReporter. That service worked well, but not many customers ever used it (who really monitors the workstation event logs...).

With the rise of Windows 2008 Server, we saw a notable increase in interest. And we finally got questions! While we always supported all properties, some of the former event log monitor properties are not available under the Windows 2008 event system. A number of customers asked if we could map them. Makes an awful lot of sense, especially if you have log analysis scripts that expect those fields. So I went to development (no longer working on Windows myself these days) and asked what we could do. I thought it would be trivial. But it wasn't. Some mappings seem to have really hard, plus we got the impression (from lack of discussion and coverage) that we are probably among the first to ever work in this area). But nothing can stop a good programmer ;)

So I was quite happy to learn today that we have finally manage to include a full emulation of pre-Windows 2008 event properties. The code currently is in beta, and is available both for MonitorWare Agent and EventReporter.

I am especially happy as the new emulation also makes it far easier for phpLogCon to work with Windows events in a consistent way. Not to mention that I like happy customers ;)